Ankush Thakur, SM

Biography

Sepoy Ankush Thakur hailed from Karohta village in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, born on 24 November 1998 into a family with a tradition of military service. He enlisted in 2018 at the age of nineteen and was inducted into the 3 Punjab Battalion of the Punjab Regiment, serving first on the Siachen Glacier before moving with his unit to Ladakh. During June 2020 the unit was deployed near the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh as part of Operation Snow Leopard, as tensions rose over the Galwan Valley along the route to Daulat Beg Oldie. On the night of 15 June 2020 the commanding officer of the 16 Bihar Battalion, Colonel Santosh Babu, led talks to defuse the standoff, but these turned into a brutal hand-to-hand clash as Chinese troops attacked with iron rods and clubs. In the fighting that raged for several hours along the freezing river, he and nineteen other soldiers laid down their lives for the nation. Twenty-one years old, Sepoy Ankush Thakur was awarded the Sena Medal on 26 January 2021 for his courage, devotion to duty and supreme sacrifice.